Reading HTML tables in Data Analysis Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading HTML tables

📖 Scenario: Imagine you found a webpage that shows a table of daily temperatures for a week. You want to get this data into your program to analyze it easily.

🎯 Goal: You will write a program that reads the temperature table from an HTML string and shows it as a table you can work with.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use the pandas library to read HTML tables

Extract the first table from the HTML content

Store the table in a variable called temperature_table

Print the temperature_table to see the data

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Websites often show data in tables. Being able to read these tables lets you collect and analyze data easily without manual copying.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists frequently extract data from web pages. Knowing how to read HTML tables with pandas is a useful skill for data gathering and cleaning.

1

Create the HTML string with the temperature table

Create a variable called html_data and set it to this exact HTML string containing a table with days and temperatures:

<table>
  <tr><th>Day</th><th>Temperature</th></tr>
  <tr><td>Monday</td><td>20</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Tuesday</td><td>22</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Wednesday</td><td>19</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Thursday</td><td>23</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Friday</td><td>21</td></tr>
</table>

Data Analysis Python

# Create the variable html_data with the exact HTML table string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use triple quotes ''' to create a multi-line string for the HTML table.

2

Import pandas library

Write a line to import the pandas library using the alias pd.

Data Analysis Python

html_data = '''
  DayTemperature
  Monday20
  Tuesday22
  Wednesday19
  Thursday23
  Friday21
'''

# Import pandas as pd
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the syntax import pandas as pd to import pandas with the short name pd.

3

Read the HTML table into a DataFrame

Use pd.read_html with the variable html_data to read the tables. Store the first table in a variable called temperature_table.

Data Analysis Python

import pandas as pd

html_data = '''
  DayTemperature
  Monday20
  Tuesday22
  Wednesday19
  Thursday23
  Friday21
'''

# Read the HTML tables and save the first one to temperature_table
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use pd.read_html(html_data) to get a list of tables, then select the first with [0].

4

Print the temperature table

Write a line to print the variable temperature_table to see the table data.

Data Analysis Python

import pandas as pd

html_data = '''
  DayTemperature
  Monday20
  Tuesday22
  Wednesday19
  Thursday23
  Friday21
'''

temperature_table = pd.read_html(html_data)[0]

# Print the temperature_table
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(temperature_table) to show the table.